LegoMation Shorts

The Original Movie (1985)

Broadband	Modem

TRT 0:52

PRODUCTION NOTES: This is how it all began.  My dad, who worked at the local high school, borrowed a camera from the A/V department on Memorial Day: May 27, 1985.  It was one of those two-piece models with the separate deck you carried over your shoulder.  He borrowed it in order to videotape the final Memorial Day ceremony being MC'd by an elderly family friend.  Before we left for the parade, however, I experimented with animating Legos with this simple scene.  There is no audio dubbed on this one; I was not able to do that.  Instead, in the background you can hear my little brother and later my mom playing the piano... it sounds disjointed because I was starting and stopping the deck.  Since the deck didn't have flying erase heads, the rainbow-like artifacts appear every time there is an edit.

Both Biff and Mario are in this scene, although they are wearing different hats.  When I showed this movie to Andy 4 years later, we were inspired to create Oh Well.

America's Funniest Home Videos (1990)

Broadband	Modem

TRT 4:39

PRODUCTION NOTES: This is a parody of the then-popular ABC show America's Funniest Home Videos starring Bob Saget, who even today is the most untalented man on television.  There are many references to the lame jokes Bob would say while the videos were playing, and the "home videos" themselves are football-to-the-groin type of situations that could only happen to Lego people.  As a side note, the tape itself for this short was in such terrible shape that it was nearly impossible to raise an image from some scenes.  So this version is digitally remastered for your viewing pleasure.

Medieval Times (1991)

Broadband	Modem

TRT 7:28

PRODUCTION NOTES: Medieval Times was a class project for Andy demonstrating how one became a knight in the Middle Ages.  It was animated entirely by Andy on his desk in our dorm room.  At this point in my college career, I finally had access to tape-to-tape style editing equipment in the Communications Department.  So the dialogue is generally much tighter, the sound effects more precise and the music mix is better.  It got an A.

The Humpin' Legos (1995)

Broadband	Modem

TRT 0:14

PRODUCTION NOTES: We now jump ahead to 1995.  I'm working nights as an engineer at WEEK.  After the 10:00 news was over, we would have to pre-tape several news updates which would air overnight between programs, making it look like the station had a live anchor there at all hours of the night.  When we taped them, we would slate each one with a simple graphic so that the overnight op would know which headline was which.  I quickly learned that the slates needed a background, and that background could be used to entertain the crew and anchors.  It was for these slates that the Humpin' Legos were created.

Lego Slates (1996)

Broadband	Modem	Broadband	Modem

TRT 0:24 / 0:32

PRODUCTION NOTES: The humpers return in this pair of parodies of News 25 at Six.  These were yet more slates for post-newscast use produced by Andy and I.  They both use actual audio from a newscast... an early version of SNL's "Fun With Real Audio".

The Godfather (2000)

Broadband	Modem	Broadband	Modem

TRT 2:24

PRODUCTION NOTES: This is our first attempt at animating the mouths of the Lego characters as they spoke.  We also tried to match the scenery as closely as possible.  In the scene with the band, there is a fleeting frame with a (real) little girl's head in the background.  This is Andy's daughter Arwen, and although her presence was initially an accident, we decided to leave it in because it was funny seeing her giant head flicker in the background.  Also, we somehow botched one edit as compared to the real movie's sequence of shots.  I'm not sure how it happened, but by the time we noticed, it was too late to fix it.

This is our first piece edited on an Avid editing system, an industry-standard piece of editing software and accompanying hardware.  All our subsequent work has also been cut on an Avid.

Blazing Saddles (2001)

Broadband	Modem	Broadband	Modem

TRT 1:14

PRODUCTION NOTES: This was our next attempt at moving the mouths for speech.  It's really quite funny.    We also tried to duplicate as closely as possible the camera angles, sets, characterizations and appearances of the actors from the scene we did, which you can see in the side-by-side version.  Of the three movie scenes we did, this is the best.  Please note that although we find this movie to be surely amongst Mel Brooks' best, our choice of this scene does not in any way indicate our feelings towards racism.  See behind-the-scenes photos!

The Road Warrior (2001)

Broadband	Modem	Broadband	Modem

TRT 0:43

PRODUCTION NOTES: Yet another short in a string of experiments to test procedures and such.  This really wasn't all that great... we made some mistakes while shooting it, having not put people and scenery back in the right place between frames.  We ended up having to place only the mouth from each frame over one good "head" frame; if you look closely you can see some artifacts around the mouth.  Part of the problem is that this is not as strong a scene as we had once thought, but we did do quite well building the scenery to match the movie shot-for-shot.  We did take away some valuable information from doing this one which we'll incorporate into future projects.  See behind-the-scenes photos!

Johnny Cash: Were You There (2001)

TRT 3:57

PRODUCTION NOTES (from Andy): This has to be one of the strangest combinations of ideas we have ever done: a video to a Johnny Cash gospel song from 1963, animated with Legos.  Dave and I wanted to work on animating the mouths more, and I thought a music video would be a good way to practice.  It freed us from having to match a movie shot for shot, while still providing a structure. I'm a big Johnny Cash fan, and this song didn't have a lot of words (plus I liked the idea of doing a religious song in a straightforward manner), so it made a good choice.  My wife deemed this video as the best thing we have done so far.  Please note that although we find this song to be surely amongst Johnny Cash's best, our choice does not in any way indicate our feelings towards whether or not Biff and Mario were there when the stone was rolled away.  See behind-the-scenes photos!

Some technical notes (from Dave): I like the lighting in this one, as it's more dramatic than the flat-lit stuff we had done so far.  The three-cross shot at the beginning is cool with the wide-angle lens, and the "video wall" built into the set was actually a small LCD TV fed with various scenes from other movies as well as looping graphics.  We also experimented with electronically zooming the image during the editing process, which made for some nice smooth moves that would have been difficult to do during shooting.  The stone rolling away was done with a vacuum cleaner, and the light was a 150-watt floodlight behind the set which actually ended up melting a few of the Lego pieces in that area.